Our attention, privacy, and digital interfaces

Data for convenience.

An easy trade, especially when we don’t even know that the data is being taken from us or how it is being used. It’s a trade that we make every second of every minute that we are connected to a digital device or searching the internet for

We are living in the information age and mobile devices have become a limb that is constantly attached to our bodies. The first thing that we reach for in the morning and often the last item we put down before we turn off the light to go to bed.

The perfection of the freemium business model is a tool that has seen the world’s social media networks balloon in size, both in respect to the number of users and their market caps. When Facebook started did anyone think that over two billion people would use the platform? Or when TikTok combined goofy videos and music that it would capture that attention of 800 million users… valuing it at roughly $10 Billion (a number that is being mentioned in current sale negotiations with Oracle that are looking to buy the American, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australia operations of the platform).

The eternal scroll, invented by an individual who is now working to educate people on how technology is being misused, that occupies so much of our time… where does one stop?

Working in the digital space over the last few years, as I started my data nerd journey, I have seen it evolve as a rate of knots. Data has been used cleverly to deliver better experiences for users, build better products, and exploited to drive skewed narratives that have changed the course of history.

Sitting in a presentation two years ago, while at the Inter-Governmental Fintech Working Group in South Africa, the topic a personalised crypto currency to control the value of your data was being discussed. It’s a concept that a few people who are reading this piece may be familiar with, if you would like to learn more about this you can do research around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This article, “Central banks can use digital currency as a substitute for cash in circulation initially, and it could also help to bolster liquidity, but is South Africa ready for such a commitment?”, which discusses digital currencies is a step in the right direction and may drive bigger shifts in time to come.

In short, the idea is to develop a crypto currency using blockchain technology, to allow you get ‘paid’ for the use of your data. Creating a value exchange that directly rewards an individual for the use of their data with a monetary return, rather than just allowing them to use a platform for ‘free’.

We find ourselves in an interesting predicament. Trading data for convenience/access and producing more data than we currently are able to actionably use. This is in part the reason the phrase dark data was coined.

So, where to next? There are a few contextual factors that have led me to jot down a few thoughts.

The global pandemic — over the last few months I have been thinking deeply about how data can help us to address some of the challenges that we face. I have also been exploring how Taiwan uses data to manage their city, one of the few countries that I know who has a digital minister.

User privacy and how Apple through discontinuing the IDFA have shaken the boat. Google’s decision to discontinue to use of the third party cookie by the end of 2021, and the amount of revenue mobile advertising generates.

Platform design and development — creators need to do better and use data to better enhance a user’s attention rather than exploit it.

User data has been squarely in the spotlight since 2016. Regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and more recently California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have taken massive steps to require companies to be transparent in the way they are handling user data.

Walled gardens, identity data, and Apple’s launch IOS14 in the coming weeks are a couple of the things that I have been thinking deeply about lately. Unpacking how our identity data could be used to help develop better products for us, but also thinking about the digital divide that is ever growing.

In our thinking, it is also important to remember that prior to the internet, newspapers and other forms of media were being curated/edited. The internet has enabled this curation to scale along with the information sources that we have available to us. Platforms have become editors — controlling narratives and using algorithms to build experiences tailored to a user’s needs or interests. The reason for highlighting this is to remind us that editors and curators play a crucial role in the type of content that we see. Simplifying it down to understanding how a Newspaper is compiled can help us understand elements in the system that should be relooked or challenged.

More on this in how I think changes linked to the removal of the IDFA and the depreciation of the third-party cookie are going to change the one to one advertising space in a piece soon.

In order to drive real change in the way data is used though, the pressure to change needs to come from the users of digital interfaces and platforms. Users need to ask more questions of how their data is being utilised to give them a better experience or service.

Technology and data fascinate me. A deeply interconnected space, that is full of opportunities. The internet has changed the way the world operates, curating and surfacing content at a level I think few newspaper founders in 1609, when the first printed newspapers were published in Germany, would have predicted. It’s connected dots and fundamentally altered the access humans have. We do however need to check our thinking.

Let’s build better.

Ps. You may enjoy this Podcast from Seth Godin where he discusses Adversarial interoperability.